Our Co-Founders are headed to Nebraska.Code() conference next week and will be presenting 4 sessions on Friday, May 20th. It’s a great opportunity for our team to share our experiences and give back to the community through speaking and we are pleased to have been selected to speak at Nebraska.Code() again this year.

Humanitarian Toolbox

In addition to speaking, Nebraska.Code() gives us a chance to contribute our skills to help others. The conference will be hosting the Humanitarian Toolbox project with a code-a-thon that will allow attendees to work on developing software tools to help with disaster relief around the globe. We are pleased to be able to contribute our time and skills to this great cause and hope to see many of our fellow speakers and attendees at the Code-A-Thon.

Speaking (Friday, May 20th)

Getting to Market Faster with VSTS

Visual Studio Team Services is Microsoft’s next evolution of Visual Studio Online. Come see what is new and learn how VSTS can make your life better. We will examine the different modules available and look at a sample workflow taking us from project creation through deployment. Along the way we will look at how we can use VSTS to setup our source control, continuous integration, automated testing, continuous deployment and more. VSTS is a powerful tool, come see if it is a good fit for you and your team.

Practical Patterns for the Progressing Programmer

Understanding software design patterns is critical for every developer who strives to be top-tier. Come join us as we explore some of the most common design patterns and discuss how you can leverage them to make your life easier. We will look at some real world code examples and learn to recognize common problems and how to use different design patterns to create elegant solutions. Learn to spot common anti-patterns and the pitfalls they bring. Join us and take the next step in your career.

Xamarin Forms: Writing one app to rule all your platforms

Are you seeking the Holy Grail of Write Once Run Anywhere app development? Then Xamarin Forms might be what you are looking for. This session will give you the information you need to understand Xamarin Forms and how it can be used to lower the friction of cross platform mobile development. You will see how easy it is to simultaneously create your app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone using this Open Source toolset.

Branded for Success

Everyone has a personal brand! The question is are you in control of yours, or letting others define it for you? What does your brand say about you? Are you a Coca-Cola, Pepsi or RC Cola? Brand isn't just a logo and website, it's your first impression on potential employers, clients, and even your co-workers. Let's take a look at the relevance of a personal brand in today's developer market and what you can do to take control of yours.

In case you haven’t been following the news around Microsoft’s purchase of Xamarin here is some exciting news. When this merger was first announced we were excited to see Microsoft commit to the Xamarin toolset as well as being hopeful that the business editions would become part of the MSDN collection of software (and thus save us about $2,000 per developer). What we weren’t expecting was for Microsoft to make Xamarin a standard part of Visual Studio, available to all Visual Studio developers. Not just MSDN or retail licensed developers, but all developers, including Visual Studio Community Edition.

This is a big deal for us and other companies wanting to do cross-platform mobile development with C# and .NET. Not only have our expenses been drastically reduced to continue to use the toolsets we love, but now the conversation about working with internal resources at a client to maintain, augment, or otherwise work with this product just got a lot easier. We no longer need to sell them on buying on of their developers a $2000/yr subscription to be able to work with the source we deliver them.

Hopefully this will entice other developers to take their apps to .NET and hopefully that will get their apps on Windows Phone and give it some traction in the market.

In addition to all this already great news, they have also announced that the Xamarin codebase will be open sourced and made available through GitHub. I think we can expect some great community driven improvements coming to Xamarin.Forms as those of us who have been working with it get our hands on the source.

This is a great time to be a .NET developer, and an even better time to be a .NET cross-platform mobile developer.

Bluff is an Open Source project that aims to bring useful automation and productivity commands to users of Sony Vegas Pro. It is an extension built against the Sony Vegas Pro 8 extensibility API and should be compatible with user of Sony Vegas Pro 8-13. If you would like to contribute to Bluff, then check out the GitHub project.

New to this version:

We added a new Command: Arrange Events By Created Timestamp.

We now have an official MSI installer.

We made some changes under the hood by updating the project to .NET 3.5 and converting all the User Interface to WPF.

We started building the official release against the Vegas Pro 8 DLL for better compatibility.

Announcing the first official release of our Open Source project Bluff

Bluff is an Open Source project to help make you look like you know what you are doing in Sony Vegas Pro. Developed using the Vegas Pro extension model, it takes you a step beyond what can easily be done inside a standard script. Developed initially to help create some custom video effects for internal and personal video projects. We thought it would be useful to other content producers out there and would like to see it improved by the community.

Bluff currently adds several useful commands to assist your video production process, including:

Create Video Wall

Order Events by Name and In Time

Randomize Events

Convert Markers to Regions

Reorder Markers

Split Region

Bluff requires Sony Vegas Pro, has been tested and built against Sony Vegas Pro 12, and should also work with version 13.

The official release binaries and installation instructions can be found on our GitHub Release page.

If you would like to contribute head over to the repository and fork the project today.

It's been just a short 2 weeks since the Heartland Developers Conference wrapped up and we are already looking forward to the St Louis Days of .NET in November.

Heartland Developers Conference

This year's Heartland Developers Conference was another great experience for us. Co-Founder Duane Newman presented a well attended session titled "Double Down with DevOps" and had lots of interaction from the audience. He talked about the value of embracing IT into your development process and how approaching IT operations from a developers perspective can impact your daily work life in a positive way. While there were many faces we recognized from past years we enjoyed meeting many new speakers and attendees. Our team is already looking forward to returning next year.

St. Louis Days of .NET

We are now in preparations for our next road trip. We will be heading to the St. Louis Days of .NET conference November 12th - 14th. It will be at the Ameristar Conference Center in St. Charles, MO. The great part about the meeting place is that once you arrive you never have to go outside until the conference is over (this can be a big deal in Missouri in November, last year it snowed). Both Brent and Duane will be presenting sessions this year. Brent will be presenting Level Up with PowerShell and Practical Patterns for the Progressing Programmer and Duane will be presenting Double Down with DevOps. We hope to see you all there.

Time is a valuable and precious resource, and it seems there are never enough hours in a day. Come learn how PowerShell can empower you to be a more effective developer. We'll look at how PowerShell can be used to help solve common problems and examine what makes it such a rich and powerful tool. In this session we will look at how PowerShell is built on top of the .NET framework and how you can leverage you existing skills to automate different aspects of your development/deployment processes.

Understanding software design patterns is critical for every developer who strives to be top-tier. Come join us as we explore some of the most common design patterns and discuss how you can leverage them to make your life easier. We will look at some real world code examples and learn to recognize common problems and how to use different design patterns to create elegant solutions. Learn to spot common anti-patterns and the pitfalls they bring. Join us and take the next step in your career.

Are you ready to ease your deployment pains while at the same time making yourself more marketable? DevOps may be a hot buzzword that will get recruiters on the phone, but it will do more for you than just increasing your resume appeal. Most of us aren't blessed with a crack IT team (if we even have one) to handle operations and we are stuck doing it all. Taking a developers approach to operations by creating repeatable automated tasks will save you time and headaches. We'll take a look at some of the popular tools available to you and go over tips and tricks that I've had to learn the hard way over the years. Would you rather spend an hour watching builds, copying files, and trying to remember all the config values to change only to beat your head against the wall because you didn't stop some service when you started, or just click a button and watch IT Crowd while your code is built, deployed and tested for you? That's what I thought.

I hope you are as excited about the 2015 Kansas City Developers Conference as we are. This year both Brent and Duane will be presenting breakout sessions. Additionally they will be presenting a brand new workshop on Xamarin.Forms development. It’s going to be a lot of fun and we hope to see you there.

Cross-Platform Mobile with C# & Xamarin

This full day 8 hour workshop will be presented on Wednesday by both Duane and Brent. We’ll be helping attendees get up and going writing their first cross-platform app using Xamarin.Forms().

Level Up with PowerShell – Brent Stewart

Thursday 9:00 AM – Room 3501D

Time is a valuable and precious resource, and it seems there are never enough hours in a day. Come learn how PowerShell can empower you to be a more effective developer. We'll look at how PowerShell can be used to help solve common problems and examine what makes it such a rich and powerful tool.

Thursday 10:10 AM – Room 3501B

Are you seeking the Holy Grail of Write Once Run Anywhere app development? Then Xamarin Forms might be what you are looking for. This session will give you the information you need to understand Xamarin Forms and how it can be used to lower the friction of cross platform mobile development. You will see how easy it is to simultaneously create your app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

Co-Founder Duane Newman had the honor to visit with STL Tech Talk’s JJ Hammond while at the 2014 St. Louis Days of .NET conference. Duane was speaking at the conference about getting started with Xamarin.Forms. The interview focused on how Xamarin is helping C# developers be productive in mobile development and the improvements that Xamarin.Forms offers.

Recorded on November 14, 2014, it was just recently rediscovered and posted for viewing.

We just finished working on a proof of concept for a project that needed to do Active Directory authentication, primarily using Azure AD. We wanted to do this in Xamarin Forms as the app falls into the realm of a typical line of business UI app and will have a pretty straightforward design.

We started off with some great sample code from the ADAL project team. They have a beta release that supports traditional Xamarin projects (native UI) for Android and iOS as well as Windows Phone. It looked really simple and had great conveniences like async/await support. We thought it would be a walk in the park, not so.

It turns out that the beta version with Xamarin support does not support targeting Silverlight based Windows Phone assemblies. This is important, because Xamarin Forms support for Windows Phone uses the Silverlight implementations. This precluded us from including the authentication login inside the common PCL project. After a little digging it turns out that the ADAL just recently (Jan 15) released a new stable version that introduced support for Silverlight based Windows Phone apps. This was exciting, but there was no complete sample solution and the blog post announcing was missing a couple helpful nuggets of information in the code snippets.

We ended up getting it working, but not as elegantly as we had hoped. By the time I was done I understood a bit more why the original library didn’t handle Silverlight projects, it is a bit more bulky to work with for this situation.

This code is part of a client’s project so there is no sample available right now, we’ll work on getting a stripped down set of code for reference, until then here are some notes on the relevant code changes we made.

Maybe Xamarin will make some changes that allows them to target Windows Runtime based projects in the future and this will all be irrelevant, but until then hopefully this bit of code helps you make some progress doing Active Directory Authentication in your Xamarin Forms projects.

Update: It looks like last week there was a refresh to the ADAL v3 Preview, but as stated “This refresh does not work with Xamarin.Forms. We are looking into it – and if you have feedback please send it our way! – but we didn’t do work in this refresh to that end.” Good news that they are investigating integrating support. Until then Xamarin Forms and ADAL will continue to be bleeding edge.

We are excited to have the opportunity for both Brent and Duane to present sessions at Nebraska.Code() in just a couple weeks. If you are in the NE/KS area and are looking for a great conference to learn about new tech, network, and see some presentations from sought after speakers (like Mads Kristensen, Richard Campbell, Carl Franklin, and Pete Brown) you should consider attending NCC March 19th-21st in Lincoln, NE.

If you will be attending NCC we hope we get to see you in our sessions. We are both presenting on Friday (3/20) afternoon with Brent speaking at 3:30 and Duane at 4:45.

Time is a valuable and precious resource, and it seems there are never enough hours in a day. Come learn how PowerShell can empower you to be a more effective developer. We'll look at how PowerShell can be used to help solve common problems and examine what makes it such a rich and powerful tool.

Are you seeking the Holy Grail of Write Once Run Anywhere app development? Then Xamarin Forms might be what you are looking for. This session will give you the information you need to understand Xamarin Forms and how it can be used to lower the friction of cross platform mobile development. You will see how easy it is to simultaneously create your app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

Monday night Co-Founder Brent Stewart delivered a great presentation at the local Kansas City .NET User Group on how PowerShell can improve your daily tasks. He introduced the core concepts of PowerShell and many common uses. He also dispelled some common misunderstandings about what PowerShell is good for and who should use it. After that he covered the naming conventions of CmdLets and some of the more common commands you will encounter. Then he went through a series of exercises showing the basics of scripting useful utilities developers can do with PowerShell. The talk was very dynamic and Brent kept the user group entertained with his wit and engaged in the talk, providing many opportunities for audience participation.

We love working with the user group as Co-Organizers with Lee and John but it is always a good feeling when we get to also have the chance to share the tips and tricks we’ve discovered over the years with our peers.